‘Dead Ringers’ Episode 2 Recap: Hell Is Other People

How good is Dead Ringers the TV show? I’ll tell you how good it is: While watching this second episode of the show, the first comparisons that sprang to my mind were Mad Men and The Terror. The two shows with the most precise, lacerating dialogue and character work in the past 15 years? Two shows obsessed with class, status, and the creation and severing of intimacy? Two shows with absurdly stacked casts of actors given their best material ever? Two shows that had me dying to see what happened next with every episode? That’s probably a good sign for Dead Ringers, right? 

Directed like a horror movie by Sean Durkin, written by Ming Peiffer as if her life depended on every line of dialogue being an out-of-the-park home run, this is a perfect nightmare of an episode. This despite being orders of magnitude less bloody and death-haunted than the premiere. The horror emerges solely from the company Beverly and Elliot Mantle are keeping: Pharmaceutical heiress Rebecca Parker and her clique of, quite simply, the worst people you will see on television this year. As Beverly put it, “You are awful people. No, categorically, the worst people. Like, like, like, the humanity has literally been fucked out of you over the generations. Like, you have retained a, a face and a cunt and fingers, but you do not resemble humankind in any other sense of the word.” All I can say to that is amen, sister!

Oh god, these people. So, you have Rebecca, played by Jennifer Ehle with about as much empathy and humanity as the Emperor from Star Wars. You have her wife Susan (Emily Meade), who’s possibly the best of the bunch, but it’s impossible to respect a bleeding heart who doesn’t do anything with it. You have Lara (Miriam Silverman), a wellness guru with a thing for trepanning — the moment where everyone at the dinner table bows their heads and pulls their hair back to reveal circular scars from the holes they’ve drilled into their skulls is like something out of a Sopranos dream sequence — and a pathological aversion to cusswords. (Watching Elliot deliberately drive her crazy by saying “fuck” over and over is an incredible recurring bit.) You have her obsequious husband Jeremy (Aaron Dean Eisenberg), who acts like he was grown in a lab to be the perfect sensitive male feminist ally, for which he gets approximately zero respect from anyone else, including his wife. 

You have Cynthia (Diane J. Findlay), Rebecca’s lawyer, fixated on the bottom line. You have Ju Won (Soji Arai) and his translator and possibly lover (Enoch Suho Lee), a VR/AR whiz who understands but does not speak English and who absolutely drips contempt for Beverly and her soft heart. And you have Mckenzie (Allyson Kloster), quite possibly the most repulsive of the bunch, the young heiress to the side of the family that started the opioid epidemic, which she blows off as a matter of simply making a good product lots of people wanted before launching into a description of her ridiculous hobby of biohacking, eg. inserting something into her hand so that her garage door opens automatically when she approaches or whatever. 

Then there are the little details that make everything even worse. The enormous portrait of Rebecca’s ex-girlfriend’s labia, which frames her as she sits at the head of the table. Lara and Jeremy’s gaggle of blithely overprivileged blonde children, who put on a command performance of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” like they’re the tone-deaf Von Trapps. Various getting-to-know-you games, including that thing where someone puts a card on your head with the name of a person and you have to guess what it is by what your opponent tells you — this game is completely derailed by the herculean amount of wine and weed and coke they’re all consuming by now — and a kidnapping challenge that finds Beverly locked in a utility tunnel while Elliot takes the opportunity to fuck Ju Won while the translator watches. (No, he is not allowed to jerk off.)

It all culminates in the enormously cathartic rant by Bev I partially transcribed above — a glorious moment in which the character says all the things you in the audience have wanted to say about these ghouls since the start. Ironically, though, it’s this rant that persuades Rebecca to give them the money they seek for the research lab (Elliot’s pet project) and birthing center (Bev’s baby) they want to create, albeit under the condition that they franchise it ASAP and make “fast hard big motherfuckin’ scary cash.” You see how these people talk? Insufferable!

But suffer it we do, for fucking fifty minutes. It’s uncomfortable, unbearable, and completely exquisite. Like I said before, the dialogue is so cutting, so precise, and every actor proves capable of delivering it as if they really are just incredibly wealthy orcs talking off the cuff. Miriam Silverman in particular impresses as a sort of Gwyneth Paltrow possessed by some kind of demon. Aaron Dean Eisenberg provides much-needed comic relief throughout; his high point is repeating the phrase “egg viability” approximately a dozen times when describing his and Lara’s efforts to conceive more children. (The problem, he says, was actually with his low-motility sperm; Rebecca pounces immediately, saying “Jeremy shoots blanks! That’s so on-brand!” God, fucking repellent!) As for Allyson Kloster as Mckenzie, imagine if Hannah and Marnie from Girls stepped into a David Cronenberg movie and got Brundlefly’d, then given billions of dollars in blood money to play with. 

But no one is more impressive than Rachel Weisz as Elliot and Beverly. How impressive? Let’s just say that when describing the acting in this show to my wife, I very nearly began by saying “Oh, they’re great.” Plural. Like she really is two people!

Anyway, Elliot thrives in this environment because she’s pretty much just as big an asshole as everyone else, albeit with less money to burn. Her Blanche Deverauxesque perpetual horniness is both funny and extremely hot; the way she walks into Ju Won’s room all carefree and immediately orders the translator to tell him to take his pants off? The way she eagerly nods as he prepares to do so? The way she orders the translator, whose erection is visibly tenting his pants, not to masturbate as she takes it from behind from a man who’s not only a stranger but an active opponent of their plans? Oooooooooh-wee!

But wait, there’s more! Greta (Poppy Liu), their maid, has ulterior motives of an unknown kind. She collects everything that might contain Mantle DNA, from used tampons to residue from dirty underwear, and stores it in glass bottles in a garage. She’s also been preventing the twins from hearing the pleading phone messages left by their mother, recorded on an old-fashioned answering machine for some reason. And she’s far from the weirdest character on this thing!

And in a closing twist, we learn that the twin who’s going to the grief counseling group and pretending her sister is dead, celebrating it even, is not Beverly at all, but Elliot pretending to be Bev. And it’s convincing as fuck, too! Elliot, for reasons known only to her, is channeling all the things Beverly might actually say about her; it’s an echo of the way she grunted along with the sounds of Bev and Genevieve fucking in their bedroom. (Mocking Genevieve’s sex sounds is a running gag for Ellie throughout the episode.) She can’t bear Bev forming a life of her own, so she essentially becomes Bev to preserve their closeness. 

There’s probably important stuff I’m missing from an episode this packed with pleasure — oh yeah, it features the best use of the second movement from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony since A Clockwork Orange, and they get the money because Beverly is willing to beg for it after all, and Elliot makes outlandish claims about preventing menopause and designing embryos outside the womb which she’s already done for longer than the legal limit and even preventing motherfucking death — but that’s okay. What I’m really trying to convey here is my sheer enthusiasm for this thing, this mean-spirited, vicious, perverse, beautiful thing. If you’ve read this far I probably don’t need to implore you to watch it, but tell your fucking friends, get them together, have a watch party. Dead Ringers is something special, and I for one am gonna savor it, like a good dinner.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.